The Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) space is booming and is delivering great value by collapsing the SAN tier into the compute tier to drive simplicity and OpEx/CapEx savings. In fact, Gartner suggests that the HCI market will be worth $5 billion by 2019.

But there’s a catch: Traditional networking can stand in the way of achieving full TCO benefits of a HCI deployment. In order to achieve success, multiple workload types must be converged onto a single network fabric and deliver workflow automation across servers, storage and network components. The three key areas of integration needed for data center convergence success are as follows:

Physical – converge SAN, LAN (leaf/spine) and WAN into a single connectivity layer

Workload – support multiple diverse workload types on the same physical network fabric

Below please find a few of our top picks for our favorite news articles of the week.

TechTarget: The role of HCI in the hyper-converged cloudBy Scott D. LoweHyper-converged infrastructure has become a mainstream option for any workload that IT administrators might have typically hosted in a virtualized environment. HCI helps organizations adopt a hyper-converged cloud approach to data storage. Because HCI is as set-it-and-forget-it as is possible, it can help companies make great strides toward their hybrid cloud ambitions. In the early days of HCI, IT buyers tried to solve a complex problem: how to get sufficient storage performance for virtual desktops without breaking the bank.

CMSWire: What Is Hybrid Cloud Computing And Why You Should be Using ItBy David RoeHybrid cloud is an enterprise IT environment where the organization mixes and matches private cloud and public cloud infrastructure.1 This allows them to combine the online capability of a public cloud with the on-premises security of a private cloud. It offers businesses greater flexibility in where they host resources, enabling them to run classified applications or mission-critical workloads on the private cloud, while maintaining the ability to access resources like SaaS and IaaS on the public cloud.

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Plexxi co-founder and Vice President of Product Management Mat Mathews has spent 20 years in the networking industry observing, experimenting and ultimately honing his technology vision. The resulting product — a combination of traditional networking, software-defined networking and photonic switching — represents the best of Mat's career experiences. Prior to Plexxi, Mat held VP of Product Management roles at Arbor Networks and Crossbeam Systems. Mat began his career as a software engineer for Wellfleet Communications, building high speed Frame Relay Switches for the carrier market. Mat holds a Bachelors of Science in Computer Systems Engineering from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.